1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a harvester apparatus and particularly to a harvester for vine growing crops such as cucumbers.
2. Description of Related Art
Heretofore, various embodiments of harvesting equipment for harvesting cucumbers and the like have been proposed with the purpose of reducing or eliminating the manual labor involved in the harvesting. Examples of such harvesters may be found in the following U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,347,031; No. 3,387,611; No. 3,916,913; No. Re. 27,715; No. 3,457,711; No. 3,427,794; No. 3,386,236; No. 3,365,869; No. 3,600,882; and No. 3,416,298.
While the harvesters disclosed in the above patents were directed to solving particular problems associated with the harvesting of cucumbers, it is believed that none of those, nor any other harvester design has been successfully employed on a wide-scale commercial harvesting basis, without suffering from one or more drawbacks. A major problem encountered in the mechanical harvesting of cucumbers is that transporting the cucumbers and separating the cucumbers from the vine on which they are grown have commonly caused the cucumbers to be damaged, either by bruising or abrading. In addition, removal and disposal of the vine material once the cucumbers have been removed therefrom is another problem which prior harvesters have attempted to solve.
Another problem encountered in the art, apparently going unsolved until the design of the harvester of the present invention, is that the cucumbers harvested may be found in either a dense "canopy" or in more sparse crop conditions, and the condition of the soil in which the cucumber vines are grown may vary to a wide extent. In addition, while some harvester devices have been designed to take into account the varying sizes of the cucumbers being harvested, none of the designs appear to provide the ability to optimize the operation of the harvester when harvesting primarily large cucumbers and/or when the harvester is used to harvest vines bearing primarily, if not exclusively, smaller "pickle" cucumbers.
All harvesters previously employed in the art have also used a short, steep belt to take up the vine and cucumbers. Slippage of the cucumbers downwardly due to the steep incline was commonly experienced which resulted in bruising and or abrading of the cucumbers thereby rendering damaged harvested products, reducing the yield of salable crop.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide a vine crop harvester which overcomes the problems identified with respect to the bruising or abrading of the crop in the process of removing the crop from the ground, separating the crop from the vine, and transporting the crop to a storage location.
It is another important object of the present invention to provide a vine crop harvester which has the ability to optimize operation of the harvester based on varying crop densities, varying crop sizes and varying soil conditions.